7/09/2007 @ 4:09PM

Solar Power Heats Up With Nanotechnology

Martin Roscheisen is the CEO of Nanosolar, a leading solar power innovator that he started in 2002 to make solar electricity mainstream. One of the U.S.’ top 10 entrepreneurs under the age of 40, Roscheisen’s prior track record includes creating three successful information technology companies that delivered a combined value of more than $1.2 billion.

In 1995, Roscheisen co-founded FindLaw, an Internet legal site, now part of Thomson‘s
West Group. In 1997, Roscheisen co-founded TradingDynamics, an enterprise software company, later acquired by
Ariba
for $740 million. A year later, Roscheisen became CEO of eGroups, an e-mail messaging company, acquired by
Yahoo!
in a transaction valued at $450 million.

An Austrian citizen born in Munich, Germany, Roscheisen got his Silicon Valley apprenticeship as a teenager during a year at Xerox PARC. He also received a doctorate from Stanford University’s School of Engineering. His company competes against
BP Solar
, Kyocera Solar and
Evergreen Solar
.

In your experience, how does commercializing a nano-oriented technology vary from an information technology-based product?

Commercializing a materials science-based product with fast, start-up-speed execution requires dealing very smartly with a constant simultaneity of interconnected tasks on very different time horizons–e.g., next week’s experiments, next month’s pilot tooling and nine-month out production capacity or supply agreements.

In a software company, on the other hand, execution speed is pretty much just limited by the number of hours one’s engineers can stay awake. So coffee is more important in an IT company. And managing software engineers tends to be more challenging than managing materials scientists and engineers; for one, the latter tend to be 27 and older as opposed to 21 and older.

Nanosolar garnered a lot of news when it raised $100 million to build a factory. What are the key issues that a company like Nanosolar needs to address in scaling its operations?

We incorporated scaling issues very early on into the research and development of our nanotech-based processes. As a result, we had rather few issues and were able to move very quickly to nanotech volumes. It is important to demystify the notion of “manufacturing scaling.” Good commercial design maximizes constraints applied in the very beginning and avoids going down a certain road based on a partial set of (e.g., science-only) constraints with a partial team DNA–and then having to redo everything later on with a team that has the right mix of science and manufacturing engineering DNA.

Is the heated environment for solar and cleantech investing a positive or negative for Nanosolar?

It is a net positive in that it enables an unprecedented degree of innovation. But it is an additional risk in that one needs to be prepared for navigating through an environment with a higher degree of volatility.

If an entrepreneur who is reading this is inspired, what stops him from going out and creating a replica of Nanosolar?

Luck, timing and more than 200 patents. I’m not sure even one of us would be able to create a replica.

Prior to starting Nanosolar, when did you become aware of nanotechnology? When did you become convinced of its power to have a massive impact on technology and business?

I first learned about nanotech in 2001 as an adviser to a company with certain molecular self-assembly technology.

What inspired you to start Nanosolar? How did you get involved in the space?

The mandate for us to do something in energy as well as the vast open entrepreneurial frontier in a trillion-dollar industry and the fascinating advances–often of 100 times or 1,000 times difference on some attribute–we have recently seen in materials science and nanotechnology.

What have been some of the pleasant surprises along the way and what have been hurdles you’ve run into that you never expected?

One pleasant surprise was that a lot of very basic things simply haven’t even been tried yet by anyone. Working in a space with low-hanging fruit definitely makes it easier to deliver on fundamental advances. Unexpected hurdles include the difficulty of hiring critical science talent from abroad, with H1B visas very difficult to obtain.

In a blue sky scenario 10 years from now, where is Nanosolar and what is it remembered for?

We are planning on Nanosolar being the dominant volume manufacturer of solar cells and panels, with no other company capable of getting anywhere close to our cost and capital efficiency. It’s simply not going to be that much fun for a lot of people in the industry to manufacture at cost points that are distinctly above our price points. We will be known for having brought solar to scale through grid-parity economics and a dizzying array of innovations from the materials to the device, the product and the solutions level.